Ancient lineage of algae found to include five ’cryptic’ species

One of the newly identified and described species, Chlorokybus cerfii sp. nov. Photo: Dr Tatyana Darienko Research team led by Göttingen University use genomic data to discover five species hidden in rare alga All land plants originated from a single evolutionary event when freshwater algae got a foothold on land, giving rise to an astonishing biodiversity of plants on earth. However, the group of algae that would later give rise to land plants had already been living and evolving in both freshwater and terrestrial habitats for over one billion years. There is a tiny group of these algae still living that are most distantly related to land plants. A team from the University of Göttingen honed in on one species of these rare algae, Chlorokybus ,that forms "cell packages" and lives in wet soil and rock cracks. The researchers discovered that Chlorokybus contains not one, as previously thought, but at least five different species.